4 Recruitment Trends to look out for in 2019

4 Recruitment Trends to look out for in 2019

22 February 2019

After feeling refreshed and full of New Year’s resolutions, it’s no surprise that there is a spike in resignations between January and February every year. This means recruitment activities will be ramped up in the coming weeks.

LinkedIn have identified four key global trends influencing the way recruitment will be carried out in future. These are all moving recruitment from being a transactional process to a more intuitive human-led process based around relationships.

1. New interview tools – refreshed approach to identify top talent

Traditional interviewing approaches have followed the same format for many years. In recent years, employers have figured that this unstructured interview style, often leads to poor results. There is a ton of research out there showing that interviewers often make their initial assessment within the first five minutes and then spend the rest of the interview working to confirming the bias.

Employers should refresh the way they interview their candidates and not just having a structured interview process. Some tools and assessments to consider are:

• Online soft skills assessments. These measure soft-skills such as teamwork, which provide a good picture of candidates earlier in the process. This technique is popular with graduate recruitment drives and for frontline roles.

• Offer a job trial where the business can pay the candidate to do real work so that they can observe skills in action.

• Having a ‘casual interview’ over coffee or lunch to have a better picture of the candidate’s character. Bank and brokerage firm, Charles Schwab often take their candidates out to lunch and asks for the restaurant to mess up their orders on purpose to see how they manage and respond to the stuff up.

• Using virtual reality (VR) where companies can immerse candidates in simulated environment test their skills. Companies have reported that VR have helped to reduce some unconscious bias.

• Using video interviewing wherethe candidate answers questions in a pre-recorded interview. This helps to save time and thereby fast-tracking the recruitment process (which can often take weeks to months to finalise).

2. Diversity is now the global standard

LinkedIn’s said that 78% of companies prioritise diversity to improve their working culture and 62% do so to boost financial performance.

Diversity has traditionally been used as a tick-box exercise, but today diversity is directly linked and accountable to culture and financial performance. Evidence also shows how diverse teams are more productive, innovative, and more engaged.

This doesn’t come as a surprise because we cannot ignore the changing landscape of our workforce. For instance, there are now 5 generations in the workplace.

3. Power in understanding data - it’s all in the numbers

While translating data into insights is not a new thing – not all insights are smart and created equal.

What’s new in Talent Acquisition data is that the quality of the insights and the speed at which it can be used to predict and make hiring decisions – not just track the candidates.

Data can be used to create a pipeline of future talent. In the search for the best talent, you’re no longer searching in a small pool of candidates in your own industry – you’ll be competing with global players as well.

4. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the secret sauce

AI is here to stay and you can be rest-assured that it will never eliminate the human touch.

The key benefits to AI is that it will save a big chunk of time spent on administrative and process-driven tasks which can otherwise be automated. It also has the potential to reduce human bias from the screening process.

LinkedIn states that its impact will be far more considerable and won’t be restricted to basic tasks such as screening candidates. In the future, AI will be able to identify the best talent from the pool of available candidates out there. It will not just have an administrative functionality but be a tool fully capable of thinking and reasoning, of understanding just what you need to drive your future success and bringing that talent directly to you.